Iggy Pop: David Bowie ‘Salvaged’ Me From Professional Annihilation
Iggy Pop, one of David Bowie‘s greatest collaborators whose first two solo albums were produced by the late singer, remembered the rock legend in a new interview where the Stooges singer thanked Bowie for saving his music career. “He resurrected me,” Pop told the New York Times.
“The friendship was basically that this guy salvaged me from certain professional and maybe personal annihilation — simple as that,” Pop said. “A lot of people were curious about me, but only he was the one who had enough truly in common with me, and who actually really liked what I did and could get on board with it, and who also had decent enough intentions to help me out. He did a good thing.”
Bowie first met Pop in 1971; six years later, Bowie would serve as producer and co-writer on Pop’s debut solo album The Idiot, followed five months later by Lust for Life. In his Bowie tribute, Pop spoke about making those albums, including how The Idiot track “Nightclubbing” was recorded using a cheap keyboard and a drum machine. “[Bowie] said, ‘I can’t put out a record with that,” Pop said. “I said, ‘But I can.'” The singer described how the beat for “Lust of Life” was inspired from a call signal on the Arms Force Network while the two rockers lived in Berlin.
“[Bowie] saw me sometimes, when he wanted to voice it that way, as a modern Beat or a modern Dostoyevsky character or a modern van Gogh,” Pop said. “But he also knew I’m a hick from the sticks at heart.” Pop added that Bowie went out of his way on one tour to visit Pop’s parents in a Detroit trailer park.
“David’s friendship was the light of my life,” Pop said in a statement following Bowie’s death January 10th. “I never met such a brilliant person. He was the best there is.”